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Four years ago, a simple idea started circulating around the world — join with friends, family, colleagues and your community to give back during the holiday season. As a complement to the “spend, spend, spend” messages of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, could we set aside a day dedicated to giving your time, dollars and skills to organizations making a difference in communities at home and across the globe? Today, this idea — #GivingTuesday — has taken off and become a movement embraced by millions of people looking to expand the “season of giving” to include charitable causes. This movement has mobilized tens of millions of dollars toward deserving nonprofits, bringing together the powerful combination of everyday givers, countless organizations and major brands and celebrities.

Last year at the Case Foundation, we challenged ourselves — and the sector — to measure the collective reach of #GivingTuesday — starting with an estimate of total dollars donated to nonprofits during the 24-hour period. We recognized then, that while we couldn’t immediately measure the full impact the day had on nonprofits and their programming, we could bring increased awareness to the movement and the amount raised over the 24-hour period. Working in partnership with Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and five leading online donation platforms — Blackbaud, DonorPefect, GlobalGiving, Network for Good and Razoo — we estimated that nearly $46 million in donations were processed on #GivingTuesday in 2014.

With thanks to this pioneering set of partners, we learned a lot about the process of measuring this new, influential holiday and movement. We were pleased to take those learnings to a new level this year and partner with 92nd Street Y (92Y), the founders of #GivingTuesday, to expand this year’s measurement of the total dollars donated online and related activities on December 1, 2015. And we are pretty excited about the numbers we’re seeing.

Working with data from 24 online donation platforms, 92Y estimates that total online donations processed on #GivingTuesday more than doubled from 2014, to a staggering $116.7 million given by 698,961 online donors. These growing numbers are the cherry on top of a mountain of evidence that #GivingTuesday is a movement that is here to stay. The data found that the average amount donated by individuals was $107.47.

The success of #GivingTuesday is driven in large part by the huge social media effort and online giving campaigns from nonprofits, media partners, individuals and more. Over the course of the day, more than 1.3 million tweets mentioning the #GivingTuesday hashtag were shared. This was an increase of 86 percent from 2014. And the leading issues shared on social channels included education, environment, animals, healthcare and international affairs.

This year, several of the data providers also launched their own online challenges encouraging individuals to support a cause they cared about. PayPal matched one percent of every donation of $10 or more made through the PayPal Giving Fund and is currently running for the Guinness World Records™ title for the most money donated online for charity in 24 hours. GoodWorld, which facilitates donations directly on Facebook and Twitter with a hashtag, announced a $1 million match to charities. And the CrowdRise Giving Tower used virtual reality to show the collective impact of everyone giving back on #GivingTuesday reaching heights of more than 4,359 feet tall.

At the Case Foundation we have been long-time champions of the collective power of small gifts to make meaningful change in communities. We are thrilled to see the tremendous growth of the #GivingTuesday movement both online through donations shared and through the overall awareness the day raises for global issues. We are proud to partner this year with 92Y and share with you the making of another big bet that is revolutionizing philanthropy.

We invite you to check out our infographic below detailing highlights from the day. We hope you will share the results in celebration of the global movement that has united tens of thousands of partners and millions of individuals, businesses, communities and nonprofits in a day of giving back across the globe.

This Spotlight is authored by guest writer Caitlin Kelly as part of a special blog series by the Case Foundation featuring Be Fearless stories from the field. Follow along with us as we meet people and learn about organizations that are taking risks, being bold and failing forward in their efforts to create transformative change in the social sector.

Last year, a number of well-known tech-focused companies released information about their employees that relates specifically to race and gender. The results shone a light on the deeply rooted challenges this sector faces when it comes to diversity. Breaking through those obstacles remains a challenge for women and minorities in particular—one that the Kapor Center for Social Impact (Kapor Center), based in Oakland, California, is boldly tackling every day.

The Kapor Center wears its mission on its sleeve: “We believe that when the community of tech leaders reflects the diversity of the United States, tech will play an integral role in closing gaps and disparities that exist in this country,” the organization’s website states. “Via proven methods from the for-profit and nonprofit fields, we work in partnership with a diverse set of stakeholders to maximize social impact.” Over the years, the Kapor Center has focused its efforts on audacious, “gap-closing” endeavors. The “gap” in these cases refers to a number of challenges facing society today—gaps in academic achievement, access to health care and economic opportunity, as well as gaps in income, information and social mobility.

To achieve these lofty goals, the Kapor Center funds a variety of groundbreaking initiatives and entrepreneurs aimed at stopping what it calls the Leaky Tech Pipeline, which creates roadblocks for African Americans and other underrepresented communities of color in the tech-innovation fields. Currently, African Americans account for less than 3 percent of programmers, developers, engineers and other tech-focused talent. As a result, although African Americans are generally early adopters and users of technology, their intellectual capital is almost nonexistent in the development of new apps and tech systems, leaving in question how germane the products are to their daily lives. To address this gap, the Kapor Center has initiated several interventions, including efforts to provide greater access to educational opportunities for African American and Latino students.

One such intervention has emerged from a program called the College Bound Brotherhood, which supports college and 21st-century career readiness for Bay Area African American males. Created in 2008, the Brotherhood is the first network in the United States to focus on African American male students and connect them to college readiness programs and local resources. Using a Networked Improvement Community model—in which organizations, parents and school districts learn from, support and build with one another to become more solution-oriented toward issues specific to their community—the Brotherhood aims to place 3,000 African American males on a college-bound and college-completion track annually.

Justin Davis, a former professional basketball player who serves as a Program Officer for the Kapor Center, joined the organization in order to “pay it forward” after benefiting from the opportunities that similar funded programs offered him as a young male of color, including college prep services. Davis attended Stanford University on an athletic scholarship, studying communications, then played with the Golden State Warriors.

“In 2008, foundations weren’t investing heavily in black males’ achievement or black-male-centric initiatives,” Davis notes. “We would like to think we were seeing ahead of the curve of what was a pressing issue needing philanthropic support.” Davis says that as a result of the Kapor Center’s early investments in black males, it has been on the front lines of a larger movement, providing not only financial resources, but also “our tech inclusion lens” to such initiatives as President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, the Executive Alliance to Expand Opportunities for Boys and Men of Color, and the California Executives’ Alliance to Expand Opportunities for Boys and Men of Color.

Davis embraces a bold approach when advancing the work of the Kapor Center. Fearlessness to him means “being unapologetic about serving underserved communities, especially black and Latino, especially with regard to technology.” Noting that the tech industry is “highly homogeneous and not truly reflective of America in general,” Davis says that “our priority and focus is on creating a more diverse tech sector, so we made several investments in community-based organizations and nonprofits serving these groups. Being fearless means we’re very vocal and outspoken about this being an issue. These doors are not welcoming for people of color! And even for the few people who get in, is there a culture that retains them?”

Davis is an athlete at heart, and his competitive nature drives his work. “How do you get better at philanthropy? How do you get better at serving communities of color?” These are key questions that he challenges himself and his team to consider. “I’m always thinking about ways to improve our work and our organization.”

Davis asks, “How can we make the best investments that snowball and create a tech sector that welcomes these men? Our challenge has been trying to understand where to make those investments, as there are no blueprints for how to do this through grant-making. We’ve been making investments outside our comfort zone.”

Reflecting the skill set he developed while working with the Kapor Center, Davis has gone on to rebrand the College Bound Brotherhood, helping it to focus solely on diversifying the world of tech. That meant cutting off funding to some grantees while gambling on new and untested investments. “As part of our pivot to focus exclusively on tech, we parted with some of our long-term grant partners,” Davis says. “In doing so, an opportunity presented itself to support a number of nonprofits who weren’t receiving much interest or funding for their work aimed at exposing communities of color to coding.”

Without such focused support, Davis adds, the effects of a growing tech sector on black and Latino communities were mainly “displacement, career unreadiness and gentrification.” The Brotherhood’s investment strategy paid off: “Two to three years later, we had people so thankful for [our] taking the risk to help them grow and develop.”

While the Kapor Center is strengthening the tech pipeline for people of color, Davis is quick to point out that “there are many entry points—from a novice coder to successful entrepreneur.” He notes that not all students in the College Bound Brotherhood have been introduced to coding, but like many Americans they’re “connected at the hip to technology via cell phones or gaming consoles. We simply want to expose these young men to exactly where that technology comes from and inform them that there is a lucrative career available to them if they’re interested. We aim to build meaningful relationships with tech companies so they remain cognizant of the importance of having multiple doors through which talent of color can comfortably walk.”

The Brotherhood collaborates with more than 40 agencies and organizations, each of which contributes to the network model. Much of the success of the program is due to the engagement of unlikely partners. “They’re the big tech firms just down the road. We’re knocking on the door and getting into those closed walls,” Davis explains.

The “tech inclusion” full court press is working, he says with satisfaction. “Oh yes! We’re sitting down now with C-suite staff and doing workshops on this issue in front of hundreds and hundreds of their staff,” Davis says. “These conversations have paid dividends in the sense that we are no longer knocking on the doors (as much), but are now often answering the knock on our door.”

Yesterday millions of individuals across the globe united for one purpose – to give back to their communities and kick off the holiday season with an act of good. In its third year, #GivingTuesday harnessed the collective power of charities, online social media, businesses and individuals to transform how people think about and participate in the giving season. Whether it be a donation of time, pro bono services or money, #GivingTuesday reflects our long-held belief at the Case Foundation in the importance of collective action and of making giving a part of every individual’s daily life.

We couldn’t be more proud to support 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation as a founding partner of #GivingTuesday, taking a bet on this powerful idea to unite the globe in a day of giving back in 2012, watching it evolve to a full-fledged campaign with 10,000 partners worldwide in 2013 and now witnessing it become an annual tradition with more than 20,000 partners in 2014. And just as #GivingTuesday itself has evolved, so have the timeliness and depth of the measures it uses to assess progress. For the first time ever, this year Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and donation fundraising platforms Blackbaud, DonorPefect, GlobalGiving, Network for Good and Razoo partnered to provide collective preliminary data on the amount of donations processed on #GivingTuesday. A preliminary estimate of donations tallied from these platforms shows that $45.7 million was given on #GivingTuesday this year.

Much like everyone anxiously awaits the monthly unemployment rates and the amount of online spending on Cyber Monday and Black Friday as a measure of our nation’s economic health, measuring the amount of online donations every #GivingTuesday serves as a gauge of our nation’s philanthropic health. We recognize that this is by no means the impact measure, rather it is a valuable piece of data that provides an entry way into a much larger and more important conversation about how best and how most effectively to catalyze a culture of collaboration, giving and service. So while we are of course excited to see the total amount of giving increase year-over-year, we are perhaps more excited to witness this culture of collaboration among more than 20,000 partners; the fervor of activity on social media and online giving campaigns manifested in the nearly 700,000 tweets with the #GivingTuesday hashtag; and the data that shows how a large of number of even the smallest of donations can add up to something big. And we know that this preliminary estimate is not the end of the story – it is the first collection of a portion of the data that is out there. We look forward to that number growing as more data comes in and finding more ways to measure a movement that involves so many partners and nonprofits.

We look forward to a more detailed look at the impact of #GivingTuesday from Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy on December 17 when they release their #GivingTuesday Spotlight Report with an initial analysis of how the day has affected overall giving trends. As a teaser, we invite you to check out our infographic below! We hope you will share the results of the day in celebration of the global movement that has united more individuals, businesses, communities and nonprofits in a day of giving back across the globe.

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” – John F. Kennedy

Veterans Day is our Nation’s opportunity to acknowledge the Veterans of the United States Armed Forces for their fearlessness, courage and leadership. While it is important to express our gratitude for their heroism and willingness to sacrifice for a cause greater than themselves at all times, November 11th gives us a special chance to honor our Nation’s Veterans and to thank them for their service.

We hope that you are able to join us in showing appreciation for the brave women and men who have served in our country’s armed forces. By giving thanks, listening to a veteran’s story or sharing facts about the unique challenges they face post-service, you can show your support. In addition to participating in a moment of silence with your peers at school, work or home, we invite you to download our info-graphic and explore 11 ways you can get involved on Veterans Day.

This post was written by Derrick Feldmann on behalf of the Case Foundation:

As the song says, we’ve come so far.

Five years ago, Achieve and the Case Foundation foresaw the influence that the generation dubbed “Millennials” would have on our way of life. We also realized that powered by the strongest desire to safeguard and strengthen the world we’ve seen in modern times, this influence would have astounding results.

We decided to help make sure everyone was ready.

This year was MCON14, our fourth conference to present what we know, and how individuals and companies have successfully engaged with Millennials and causes.

Our 2014 Millennial Impact Report, released at MCON, addressed Millennials as employees. So we sought a variety of speakers from the business world – entrepreneurs who are or work with Millennials, corporations with giving campaigns open to Millennial workers, nonprofits founded by or involving Millennials, and related retailers, journalists, funders, filmmakers, social networkers, and political partisans – to let our audience hear about their efforts firsthand.

The engagement that the information received surpassed all of our (already high) expectations. We received 126 million media impressions and we trended on Twitter four times! Check out our infographic for more evidence of the impact we had both on and offline.

I loved it all, of course, but here are a few notable takeaways I experienced or heard about:

Large and small companies have giving campaigns the public barely even knows about. This means they’re doing it not to “look good,” but to actually do good. Corporations like AT&T and Allstate are finding out how much employees care about working for an organization with an authentic CSR program.

The answer is usually simpler than you think. Kohl Crecelius went to Uganda looking for a big solution to the cycle of poverty, and the answer kept coming back to two things:

Keep it simple. For him, that meant teaching people to crochet. His global business built from there.

Creatives need to know how to code. And it’s OK to turn down the president. Mike McGee convinced me that by learning computer code, you gain the power to build and share your own creative ideas. And that saying “no” to an offer from President Obama to concentrate on your biggest idea is brilliant.

We should start as a “minimum viable product.” Don’t stress if you’re not following a career path. Martin Edlund says take a career hack: Go out into the world, learn the skills you need at the time, and start applying them.

The government wants staff to bond over coffee. Some federal agencies are letting employees have Google+ Hangouts to get to know each other so they can work together better together. That’s just way more cutting-edge than I thought the government was capable of.

Tumblr and karaoke are equally fun. I think every MCON speaker made a GIF in the Tumblr room, and we have gained a new audience at MCONideas.Tumblr.com. And I’ve said all I’m going to say about the karaoke.

Our hope after every MCON is that people like you will be inspired to go back to your employer, friends, family, social networks or wherever else you spend time and apply something you learned at the conference. If you do, we’d love to hear about how it goes.

Derrick Feldmann is the President of Achieve – the creative research agency behind The Millennial Impact Project to understand how Millennials connect, involve, and give to causes. He is the coauthor of Cause for Change: The Why and How of Nonprofit Millennial Engagement published by Jossey Bass, a Wiley Imprint.

This post was written by Jenny Lawson of the Points of Light Corporate Institute on behalf of the Case Foundation:

Over the past two years, we’ve seen more than 500 companies pledge $2 billion in pro bono services to nonprofits through the national A Billion + Change campaign.

Pledge companies are inspiring others to lend their time and talent to nonprofits through the powerful business and social impact that pro bono offers.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so to celebrate Pro Bono week, we’ve partnered with A Billion + Change to release an infographic showcasing the broad social impact and business value the pledge companies are generating.

So, for Pro Bono Week, why don’t you join us in celebrating the scale of pro bono around the world and the new innovations that are emerging? How can you lead the change through pro bono?

We invite you to read the recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article on the “three trends in creative collaborations that are leading to larger-scale success” authored by Jenny Lawson and Kate Ahern.